Enrique Bravo is a gentle-mannered, soft-spoken south Texas kid who earned his theater credentials in New York before moving to Alaska.
But give him a little makeup and a straight razor and he transforms into the most maniacal mass-murderer in musical theater history.
Bravo has the title role in Perseverance Theatre's production of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." He described the character as "hell-bent on revenge, obsessed with what has happened that's made him a monster."
Perseverance's executive artistic director Art Rotch called Todd "the first celebrity serial killer," driven to homicide by an unjust prison sentence.
Stephen Sondheim's Tony-winning hit debuted in 1979 and has galvanized audiences ever since with its tale of the barber who slays his customers and sends them to a grinder, where they're turned into meat pies.
But something has happened in recent history. Where the original audience for the Victorian "penny dreadful" on which the musical is based saw Todd as an irredeemable criminal, modern theatergoers are more inclined to notice the complexities of the story.
"It was the first time someone tried to make a hero out of a psychopath," Rotch said. "It explores violence and the roots of violence. Sweeney's a product of the prison-industrial complex, a prisoner who is not reformed."
"There are so many layers of ideas," said music director Todd Hunt. "The rich oppressing the poor, the powerful oppressing the weak."
"So much of the show is about how people can be broken, how the system can break people and turn them into something that they wouldn't otherwise become," Bravo said. "Sweeney Todd would probably be a nice guy except for what happened to him.
"What's interesting in this day and age is how our perception has changed," he continued. "We don't automatically see people like Sweeney as monstrous, but we're interested in what's happened to make him the way he is. We're fascinated by what makes these people tick."
Sondheim's music for the play is often as uncomfortable as the plot, Hunt said. "It's a lot of hard music, but it does have some beautiful sections and comic relief. The music is complex, rich melodically and harmonically. The singing is difficult, tight, the harmonies are dissonant, the meters change. There's not a lot of dialogue that isn't sung."
In fact, "Sweeney Todd" is often included in opera repertoire. It says something about the universality of the character that he's been played by both screen star Johnny Depp and Metropolitan baritone Bryn Terfel.
"The music is constantly shifting," Bravo said. "Usually it's so subtle that the audience doesn't pick up on it, but the performer has to be paying attention."
Bravo, who performed in this production when it debuted in Juneau earlier in the season, said he was looking forward to singing in the much bigger Discovery Theatre. "Vocally, it's a better space," he said. "But it's keeping us busy adjusting to the size."
Rotch said the scale of the Discovery and it's different stage caused the cast, which is the same as in Juneau, to make several changes. The orchestra was also enlarged from five players to 10, almost all from Anchorage.
For Hunt, who had to lead the Juneau ensemble while playing winds, the added resources are welcome. "I'm conducting from the baton!" he said gleefully.
In addition to the orchestra, there are 14 performers on stage. The performance runs about 2 ½ hours including one intermission.
SWEENEY TODD will be presented by Perseverance Theater at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday through May 29 in the Discovery Theatre. A pay-what-you-can preview will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 20. Regular performance tickets are available at centertix.net.